This Sunday we start the Christian year with the first Sunday of Advent. We will be marking the Sunday’s in Advent by lighting the candles of the Advent wreath. This tradition serves as a countdown to Christmas. The first candle in the Advent wreath is sometimes called the Hope Candle or the Prophecy Candle. “Hope” will serve as a theme of sorts during our worship service and sermon.
The experience of Israel in the Old Testament provides numerous stories in which the New Testament church understands her present circumstances. The two most common metaphors employed are that the church and the Christian are either sojourning in the wilderness as Israel did before entering the promised land or they are living in exile while awaiting the promised return. In either case the destination is the promised land where God’s people find their home and place in the midst of God’s creation and their hope fulfilled.
In the 1700 and 1800’s many song and hymn writers employed the metaphor of sojourning in the wilderness. Songs such as “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, “Farewell My Friends I’m Bound for Canaan,” and “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah” all speak to hardness of life for those in the wild beyond Canaan and hope of home and place and rest.
This Sunday we will sing a re-tuning of an Isaac Watts hymn entitled, “There is a land of pure delight. Here are Watts’ lyrics as Red Mountain Music makes use of them in their re-tuning of his him. You may listen to their version below.
There is a land of pure delight
Where saints, immortal reign
Infinite day excludes the night
And pleasures banish pain
There everlasting spring abides
And never withering flowers:
Death, like a narrow sea, divides
This heav’nly land from ours
Could we but climb where Moses stood
And view the landscape o’er
Not Jordan’s streams nor death’s cold flood
Should fright us from this shore
O could we make our doubts remove
Those gloomy thoughts that rise
And see the Canaan that we love
With unbeclouded eyes!
Could we but climb where Moses stood
And view the landscape o’er
Not Jordan’s streams nor death’s cold flood
Should fright us from this shore
You may listen to the song on Youtube HERE.